Monday, 20 July 2015

This is the text of an audio 'lecture' that I’ll
be delivering at some point in the near future.

My name’s Al and I’d like to talk to you about superheroes, films and
comics.But mostly superheroes.And you might not like what I’m going to say.

When I was growing up, I loved comics.Absolutely loved them.Comics were part of British culture, of
course, and had been for over a century in one form or another - shut up,
Yellow Kid, I’m afraid Glasgow invented the comic.It turned out that America had comics
too; they were a big part of making sure that literacy levels amongst postwar
US youngsters hit percentages that’d make marketing departments weep with joy today.Still, that was then.

There’s a common misconception that comics are somehow less worthy than novels,
plays or poems.Hopefully, this is based
on an inbuilt misunderstanding about how to actually read a comic.I say ‘hopefully’,
because the alternative explanation can only be snobbery, and that’d be a shame.Y’see, comics can be read in three different
ways.

The ‘easy’ mode: piecing the story together using just the pictures.

The ‘medium’ mode: using the word balloons (or other text) in conjunction with the images.

The ‘expert’ mode: misunderstanding the comic entirely in order to force it
into the shape of whatever erroneous theory the ‘expert’ in question has
decided will get them noticed.This is
the only way to read comics that you can charge for.

There are only two
ways to read comics.Although that makes
them more accessible to a wider audience than novels, plays or poems it doesn’t follow that it also makes them inferior to those media.In fact, of novels, plays and poems, comics
are most closely linked to plays – but we’ll come back to why.I’ve still got a lot of people to offend.

We’ll skip the first few centuries of superheroes – Robin Hood, Baroness Orczy’s
masked guillotine-confounder-with-a-secret-identity and the like.Superheroes as we know them today first appeared
in the spring of 1953, in the fourth issue of Mad.Written by Harvey
Kurtzman and beautifully rendered by Wally Wood, the eight page Superdupermanwas neither lengthy or obviously subtle.It’s easy enough to find, so I won’t insult
your intelligence by describing it panel by panel.A quick summary might be: “What if
superheroes were real?”It’s a parody
that examines what we’d now call superheroic tropes, but also lampoons the court
case where the owners of Superman sued the owners of Captain Marvel for plagiarism.It’s worth pointing out that Superduperman’s legacy contains another
messy court case involving a superhero with ‘Marvel’ in his name because we
won’t be coming back to it today.

Superduperman’s influence on modern
culture is, almost entirely, down to a young Northamptonian on his holidays
picking up a copy of Mad #4 and
thinking, “I could do that.”Being
British, he decided to parody a local superhero rather than an American one and,
because of that eleven-year old’s bright idea we’re – arguably – where we are
today.Of course, that’s not totally the
case.We need to take my childhood into account to fill in the
rest of the gaps.

British and American comics were different in many ways during the Seventies
and Eighties.Partially that’s down to
cultural differences.British comics had
a weird class thing going on that was largely absent in the Marvel and DC
imports that’d turn up in a frustratingly unreliable fashion, depending on your
postcode and whether or not the ship they’d been ballast in had sunk.Marvel had half-arsedly tried to break into
the UK market in the Seventies with Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe’s Captain Britain, but mostly they’d stuck
to licensing weekly black and white reprints with unsung-hero Howard Bender
often sticking Letratone over the art to give it more depth.The UK comic world was monochromatic.You might get line art decorated with moiré-patterned
red or blue if you were lucky, but full(ish) colour was too expensive to be
used anywhere other than the cover and centre-pages.Colour was just too expensive.And, make no mistake, comics were cheap.The paper was cheap.The printing was cheap.The page rates were (and, it seems, still
are) cheap.Which brings me back to
plays.

The reason that comics might as well be in the same genus as plays is down to
performance.Unlike plays, which are
performed by actors in a (largely) public place, comics are performed by the
reader in the privacy of their heads.Remember
what I said earlier about there being two ways to read comics?Part of the reason children got comics – in
both senses – is because it’s a very forgiving medium for anyone who finds the
more traditional (and blunt) definition of reading a challenging activity for
whatever reason.Sometimes it can be a
learning difficulty and sometimes it’s down to experience.Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding Comics breaks down the
invisible rules that, unlike how to mindlessly pull apart a poem in a way
that’ll pass an exam and keep the league tables looking good, don’t get taught in
schools.

Luckily, children can teach themselves
how to read comics.It’s very rare that
anyone’ll be arsed to sit down and talk a child through the initial steps –
possibly because it’s intuitive anyway – in the same way they’d, hopefully,
spend hours reading books to the same child.Comics’re forgiving because, at a fundamental level, you can tell a
story with two silent panels that almost anyone,
regardless of upbringing or location should be able to understand.

And that’s part of
the problem that comics have.They seem
to be too accessible.That’s why English teachers, and other people
who should really know better, tend to look down on them.It’s ignorance, pure and simple.But, we’ll talk about that another day.For now, just take it as read that, in
Britain, comics were (and still largely are) seen as something you grew out
of.In fact, hold that thought, we’ll be
needing it later.

I read comics voraciously.Beano, Dandy, School Fun, Spider-Man Weekly, Future Tense, Buster, Whizzer and Chips, Valour, Hulk Weekly, Doctor Who Comic (shush, that’s what it’s
called), Toby, Star Wars Weekly, Fun To Do,
Starlord, 2000 AD, Rampage, Shiver and Shake, Commando, Battle, Speed, Tiger, Eagle amongst many
others; I also read my way through
the entire children’s section of the library.You’ll notice that list contains a fair few Marvel superheroes, but no
DC ones.There’s a reason for that.With the notable exception of Batman, I found
DC to be lumpen, leaden and joy-absorbingly tedious.I still couldn’t tell you why that was, but
I’ve a suspicion Marvel’s marketing had a lot to do with it.

So, having put the
hours in, I wasn’t doing badly on the reading front by the time the
mid-Eighties splashed all over me.The
Bomb was lurking just round the corner, like the Loch Ness Monster clutching a
Gladstone bag, and the days were neon, angular and slightly too high-pitched.I’d followed
the writing career of the young holidaymaker mentioned earlier with much
interest.I was interested in who wrote
and drew these things.It mattered.I’d watched this chap move from the back
pages of Doctor Who Comic to 2000 AD and from there to Warrior, the Daredevils and finally all the way over the Pond and onto Saga of the Swamp Thing.My troubled trudge through puberty matched
his maturation as a writer – I grew more sophisticated as he did – and it was
deeply thrilling to age alongside.I
found comic shops, turned family daytrips into raiding parties and continued
reading and reading and reading.

In a far-distant land, Mattel were keen to produce a range of superhero figures
and so, after some prodding, Marvel came up with a maxi-series called Secret Wars which they would cross over
many of their ongoing titles, thus creating an überstory that’d potentially
shift serious units.Purely coincidentally,
DC had the same idea within a year.Crisis On Infinite Earths was an attempt
to clear up the sort of entangled continuity nightmares that naturally occur
when you keep characters, unable to develop by their very nature, hanging around
for almost half a century.

At the time, I was
reading exactly one comic that DC put out:
Saga of the Swamp Thing.I wasn’t
bothered by the mandatory crossover issue, because I didn’t give a toss about
the Crisis in question.Also, the
writer’d shown that he was able to write DC superheroes in a way that made them
interesting, which, to me, seemed something no-one else thought was an
option.

Superduperman’s got a lot to answer for.When
the writer in question finally got his chance to write his own Superman parody
for Warrior, he changed direction
slightly to reflect where the world’d moved to in the interim period, giving it
consequences rather than punchlines.He’d had a shot at writing a straightforward run on Captain Britain but proved sadly incapable, along with the sublime
Alan Davis, of not improving the character immeasurably.

Watchmen was Alan Moore’s second shot at a lengthy superhero parody.Meanwhile, the problematic Frank Miller was
writing the final Batman story.Both
series represent logical stages in their creator’s careers.They’re also something else, which people forget, and this is where you can get ready to
be offended, because I’m about to say some things you might well take
personally.

Both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen are full stops.The Dark
Knight Returns – and I’m not getting into continuity issues – is the final Batman story.That’s why what happens in it, happens.It’s the logical conclusion to a story that
can never end.It’s not meant
to be a template.

Likewise, Watchmen was supposed to be
the end of the superhero parody begun over thirty years earlier in Superduperman – even Dave Gibbons’
exquisite art was purposefully drawing on Wally Wood’s caricatures – it wasn’t
something expected to even be in print
thirty years later.Watchmen’s a novel that only appears
to be about superheroes, a deconstructive exercise designed to show some of what
is uniquely possible within the medium of comics.

People saw the violence, swearing and sexuality within Watchmen and ran with those,
rather than building on the work’s intricate crystalline subtleties. The Dark
Knight Returns is much harder to defend, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t
good.By the Nineties the next wave of
creators combined unpleasant wish-fulfilment with the sex ‘n’ violence Watchmen misreading: female characters
challenged physics; male characters bulged like they were made of basketballs
and barely a month went by without a superhero somewhere snapping bones or delivering
a heart-warming bullet to someone’s crotch.

Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and Maus
dragged comics into a spotlight they’d long avoided.With a few notable exceptions – Alan Moore
tried apologising with Supreme and his
ABC Comics line; Neil Gaiman can also take a bow – very little involving
superheroes that followed was worth reading, even though there was now a wider audiencewho wanted to.Marketing took over, and soon variant covers and mylar-bagged
investments of barely readable (and often badly-drawn) ultra-violent slugfests
saturated a market that eventually collapsed in on itself as a result.

Without having to mention Alan Moore’s Scottish Tribute Act, I’m around the
same age as the folks making the superhero films that I’m about to be horrid
about.I’m willing to bet that Whedon,
Nolan, Snyder and Millar experienced the same rush reading Watchmen and TheDark Knight Returns in the Eighties as I
did.They’re producing tributes to those
years, and you can’t blame them.So
what’s the problem?

Superheroes were a goose that looked like they should be laying shinier
cinematic eggs, but for some reason kept refusing to.That reason is actually very simple:
superheroes’re ridiculous outside of comics.When the reader’s creating the performances, impractical costumes - for
example - don’t matter.So, once a way of
making costumes play on screen got cracked (make 'em leather) the next stage
was to try flogging these children’s characters to a wider audience.And, seeing as Harry Potter managed it…

Rather than allowing them the chance to move on and mature, superhero comics tried
growing with the audience they had in the Eighties and Nineties.The companies kept pumping fans for cash,
pretending that the development they were arresting wasn’t unhealthy and a bit
creepy.No-one likes getting older, but
that doesn’t stop it happening.A large
part of our popular culture is geared toward turning childhoods into cash.

The true
industrialisation of the process is really becoming apparent now, it’s all
about making as much money as quickly as possible, the future be damned.It’s narrow-minded, greedy and, in the long
run, commercially suicidal, because when your audience’ve died of old age who
do you sell to?Despite being power
fantasy god-substitutes, superheroes can’t possibly bear the weight being laid
on them.They’re too shallow.Superheroes are a genre for children, no
longer aimed at children.The relentless
vomiting of superhero movies and TV shows will soon reach an event horizon,
possibly long before everything we’re being threatened with even troubling a
screen.

We’re currently
seeing history repeat itself.Once
again, Marvel were first out of the gate with DC sniffing along behind, walking
the same path and pretending they weren’t.Whereas Marvel have at least had the decency to attempt to make their
output entertaining, DC have opted to take a much darker route.Literally.It’s simultaneously depressing and hilarious.

God knows what sort of crisis DC’re working through at the moment, but I’ll
state for the record that, because I’m not American, I’m not part of the
culture that’s represented and reflected by their movies.It’s possibly shaping the one that I am part of though, which is worrying.

The bubble’s going to burst, just like it did with comics.Don’t forget it’s not that long ago that
Marvel were facing bankruptcy.The
bubble’s going to burst and it’s going to smell awful.The stench of nostalgia.

There’re things that comics can do that no other medium is able to, and that
includes novels, poems and plays.Comics
are capable of transcending all of those.As a medium and as an art form, comics contain the potential to be
massively important to humanity as a whole.The Europeans and Japanese get it, English teachers still don’t have the
first clue.Unfortunately, neither does anyone who thinks that
comics can only be about superheroes or that superheroes are anything other than something to grow
out of.And that’s the point:you’re not supposed to grow out of comics, you’re supposed to grow out of superheroes.

Whilst I’d have
loved all this when I was fifteen, sadly, I’m not fifteen anymore.

Excelsior!

I
hate superheroes. I think they're abominations. They don't mean
what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who
would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old
audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it
excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience
is certainly not nine to 13, it's nothing to do with them. It's an
audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone
came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they
were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love
of Green
Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way
emotionally subnormal.

Sunday, 12 July 2015

That which has been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

- Paul Valery

We both make an appearance on the latest edition of the sparkling Who Wars podcast, along with some very fine folk. This is a slightly longer transcript of what we said. Go and have a listen, subscribe or what-have-you - it's great. (And also contains the interview with Colin Baker as carried out by the wonderful Rev.)

Just to spoil the surprise somewhat, the section of Who Wars that we feature in is slightly four-dimensional. In many ways, it's more of a trailer for reviews than a review of a trailer. Read into that whatever you like, chums...

Me: I'm just going to press 'play' and get a reaction. See what you think of it. This went live at Comic Con in San Diego, okay? I won't say anything else. Have a watch and I'll get your reaction afterwards. Okay?

Me: The original one. I don't know. Looks good. Looks like a model. Right. Are you excited about the new series of Doctor Who?

Him: Sure.

Me: The, "What took you so long?" The bit at the end. Any idea who that might be, or what that might be about?

Him: Like I said, I don't actually try and think into these things, I wait and see.

Me: Okay. Does the trailer make you more excited about the series?

Him: What're you trying to do?

Me: I'm trying to get answers out of you.

Him: Honestly, what're you trying to do?

Me: Ha! I'm trying to get your reactions to the trailer. Did you enjoy the trailer?

Him: Sure.

Me: Okay. Right. Great. And are you excited about the new series of Doctor Who, then?

Him: You've already asked me that.

Me: I know, but I'm not sure I'm getting an answer.

Him: Yeah.

Me: Ha! "Yeah." That's your answer is it? Okay, were there any bits in that- What about the guitar? Did you like the guitar?

Him: Right, I don't have... You know when you hold down the camera button on some of the later Apple products?

Me: Uh huh.

Him: And it takes twenty-four photos a second?

Me: Yeah.

Him: Unlike you, I can't do that, and save them all to my memory. And then look at every single one individually.

Me: Okay.

Him: 'cause when you put on a trailer, I see you sitting there, just blinking your eyes repeatedly-

Me: Ha!

Him:snapsnapsnapsnapsnap snap Taking every single second in as twenty-four photos and then sifting through them all going, "Yeah, what about that white Dalek?"

Me: Well, in fairness, someone else pointed that out. The guitar bit I noticed because it made me go, "Nrrrgggh." I wasn't too pleased with the guitar bit, but then that's ridiculous because it's just a trailer. Do you want to watch the Sherlock one?

Him: No, I don't.

Me: Okay. So, I suppose it's goodnight from me and it's...

Him: I wish it was goodnight. You've just woken me up and this is not a good time to be waking up. I could've slept for a few more hours.

Me: You couldn't have slept for a few more hours. Civilisation would've come to an end! You've been asleep for, like, forty hours. Any longer and you'd be hibernating.

Him: I haven't been asleep that long.

Me: Yes, you have. Comparatively. I think you're growing.

Him: I think you're growing.

Me: Yeah, I am. I'm definitely growing. And on that bombshell!

1. I haven't seen anyone point out that, with all the water and undersea bases and so on, it's obviously a hint that Fury the Deep's finally burrowed its way out of the BBC Canteen... And, yes, that's what it's called.